The Case Against Open Kitchens

For forty years, open kitchens have been the chic ideal, but separate kitchens offer cooks the lost luxury of boundaries—and a place for secrets.

Photograph from Alamy

When I was a small child, my dad had a window cut into the galley
kitchen of our walk-up apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street. The idea
was that my mother could share in the socializing in the living room,
while friends drinking Chardonnay could enjoy the sight of my mother
preparing the chicken Marbella. My mom hated the window. A proficient
but highly strung cook, she did not enjoy being watched; she did not
like being distracted by the discussions of the Iran-Contra affair and
“Double Fantasy”; she especially disliked the frantic race to wash or
hide the dirty dishes that were now visible to her guests. My dad
defended the window, which, he felt, gave proceedings a raffish,
short-order air. Why would anyone choose to spend time in a box? But
then my dad does not cook: he hosts.

For the past forty years, since the postwar housing boom introduced a
new paradigm of casual living, the open kitchen has been an expression
of effortless modern chic. Watch any HGTV home-remodelling show and
you’ll see that the open kitchen, along with a massive TV and some kind
of fire pit, is one of the common features employed to create a space
for a life of parties, of margaritas, of salads strewn with pomegranate
seeds. Open-plan kitchens are luxuriant, sexy; when Christian Grey takes
the Pouilly-Fumé from the wine fridge, he does so with a clear sight
line to the glinting lights of Seattle’s Space Needle.

One of the earliest open-plan kitchens was designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright, for his Willey House, in 1934. It provided the blueprint for a
postwar society in which families no longer employed live-in help,
convenience foods limited the hours family cooks spent toiling over hot
stoves, and stronger extractor-hood fans meant that food odors no longer
needed to be sequestered. Open-plan kitchens on the sets of TV
sitcoms—think of all that banter with Alice in “The Brady Bunch”—made
for easier dinner-table shots and reinforced the idea that a
philosophically desirable modern life involved as few boundaries as
possible. The open-kitchen boom fuelled a new market in status pieces
such as Michael Graves’s Alessi tea kettle, or Philippe Starck’s juicer.
Today, Pinterest makes it clear that a desirable kitchen contains not
just a breakfast bar and several vintagey pendant lamps but a
subway-tile backsplash, a Wolf range, a couple of succulents, and open
shelving displaying a spare assortment of hand-thrown pottery. For the
past two decades, according to Matthew, a Manhattan realtor who asked to
use only his first name, “most young families prefer to open up the
formal dining room and kitchen into a single ‘great room.’ ”

And yet people who actually like cooking tend to crave boundaries—to
want to be, as Julia Child assured us we could be, “alone in the
kitchen.” What if you wish to preserve a kitchen secret—to slip, say,
the odd, shameful envelope of Lipton’s onion-soup mix into your meat
loaf, à la Ann Landers? Radical transparency becomes kitchen
exhibitionism: we are all on cooking shows now. The food writer Sierra
Tishgart, whose kitchen opens onto her Greenwich Village junior
one-bedroom, told me that she dreams of a closed kitchen. “I also don’t
have a dishwasher, and part of the horror of my open kitchen (which is
basically inside my living room) is that there’s nowhere to hide dirty
plates.” One friend told me that she has developed the habit of hiding
dirty pots in her oven. We all know, from experience, that the open
kitchen is an invitation to guests to hop up, one by one, like
whack-a-moles, with their dirty dishes.

Restaurants have been dealing with the dilemma of showmanship versus
practicality for years. Lukas Volger, a chef and cookbook author, told
me that, as a diner, he loves open kitchens in restaurants. “My favorite
spot is always at the bar where I have a clear view of the cooks working
the line.” But, he added, “It’s worth remembering that there’s usually a
prep kitchen out of sight, where all the less cinematic, boring, messy
stuff happens.” Indeed, a new housing complex by the developer Ian
Schrager includes two kitchens in each unit: a “chef’s kitchen” and a
“social kitchen.”

Audrey Brashich, a real-estate writer, defended her decision to keep the
original kitchen in her Craftsman bungalow the way she found it, in the
face of pressure from an architect. “To me, they aren’t isolated and
inconvenient but rather refined and gracious,” she said. James Fenton,
the poet and critic, retained his Harlem brownstone’s original layout
rather than opening up the kitchen. By imposing modern floor plans, he
observed, “you’re giving an unsympathetic treatment to the idiom of the
building. The history of taste is full of these moments when completely
stupid, destructive misbehavior takes hold.” The notion that having
fewer rooms means having more space clings stubbornly in the face of
mathematical reality.

Tearing down walls is so much more exciting, more joyful, more heroic,
than arguing for them. The ideal may be swarms of chic friends nabbing
hot blini out of a communal pan—and yet I prefer the sense of order that
comes from having my own discrete kingdom. My own little galley kitchen
is friendly only to me: things are arranged at my height; the
pan-organizing system is completely inscrutable to all other people,
including everyone I’ve ever lived with; and it is, I guess, sort of
confusing that the salt and sugar are in identical jars. But no one
needs to see how often I cut and burn myself, or the masses of dried-up
parsley on the floor of my refrigerator, or to know how much butter and
salt they’re about to eat. My own feelings are visceral, unbending;
perhaps I was scarred by the fights over the bar window. It remains a
subject that inspires rancor. In my parents’ retirement, my mother has
acquired the self-contained kitchen of her dreams. The problem is that
she often refuses to emerge from it.